There were regular modifications to the normal day: first a Sunday – namely a Sunday with spa music on the terrace, as it appeared fortnightly, thus marking the double week, in the second half of which Hans Castorp had entered from the outside. On a TuesdayWhen he came, and so it was the fifth day, a day of spring character after that adventurous fall in the weather and relapse into winter – delicate and fresh, with clean clouds in the light blue sky and moderate sunshine over slopes and valleys, which again were a regular summer green had accepted, since the fresh snow had been doomed to seep away quickly.

It was evident that everyone was keen to honor and distinguish Sunday; Administration and guests supported each other in this endeavor. Already with the morning tea there was crumble cake, at each seat there was a jar with a few flowers, wild mountain carnations and even alpine roses, which the gentlemen put in the buttonhole of the lapel (public prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund even wore a black swallowtail with a dotted waistcoat), the ladies’ toilets wore the stamp of festive fragrance – Mrs. Chauchat appeared at breakfast in a flowing lace matinee with open sleeves, in which, while the glass door slammed shut, she first made a front and, as it were, presented herself gracefully to the room, before creeping step to hers table, and which she dressed so splendidly,she was wearing her unclean feather boa today, but underneath a green silk blouse with a ruff…Hans Castorp frowned when he caught sight of the two and changed color, which he was conspicuously inclined to do here.

Immediately after the second breakfast the spa music began on the terrace; all sorts of brass and woodwind players gathered there and played alternately briskly and solemnly, almost until lunchtime. During the concert, the rest cure was not strictly obligatory. It is true that some enjoyed the feast for the ears on their balconies, and three or four chairs were also occupied in the garden hall; but the majority of the guests sat at the small white tables on the covered platform, while easygoing creatures, who might seem too respectable to sit on chairs, occupied the stone steps leading down into the garden, and displayed much merriment there : young patients of both sexes, most of whom Hans Castorp already knew by name or by sight. Hermine Kleefeld was one of them, as well as Mr. Albin, who passed around a large flowered box of chocolates and made everyone eat from them, while he himself did not eat, but smoked cigarettes with golden tips with a fatherly air; then the plump-lipped youth from the Half-Lung Association, Miss Levi, thin and ivory-colored as she was, an ash-blonde young man who went by the name of Rasmussen and let his hands hang like flippers from flaccid joints at chest level, Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, a red-clad woman of rich physicality, who had also joined the youth and on whose brownish neck was that long, thinning-haired man who could play from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and now, with his arms around his pointed knees, behind sat on her, constantly keeping his bleary gaze fixed; a red-haired lady never ceased to keep his bleary gaze fixed; a red-haired ladyGreece, another of unknown origin with the face of a tapir, the gluttonous boy with thick glasses, another boy of fifteen or sixteen with a monocle clamped in his pocket and coughing with the long, salt-spoon-like nail of his little finger raised to his mouth capital donkey apparently – and others more.

This boy with the fingernail, Joachim said quietly, was only slightly ill when he came – without a temperature, and only to be on the safe side, he had been sent up by his father, a doctor, and according to the privy councilor he had about three sentences should stay for months. Now, after three months, he has 37.8 to 38 and is quite ill. But he also lives so unreasonably that he deserves a slap in the face.

The cousins ​​had a little table to themselves, a little apart from the others, because Hans Castorp smoked with his black beer, which he had taken with him from breakfast, and from time to time he liked his cigar a little. Dazed by the beer and the music, which, as always, caused his mouth to open and his head to tilt, he looked at the carefree bathing life around him with reddened eyes, whereby the consciousness did not disturb him at all, but on the contrary the whole The fact that all of these people were gripped by a state of inner decay that was difficult to stop and that most of them had a slight fever gave it an increased strangeness, a certain intellectual charm photographed.Fraulein from Greece drew Mr. Rasmussen on a pad, but then didn’t want to show him the picture, but turned around, laughing with wide, widely spaced teeth, so that he was not able to snatch the pad from her for a long time. Hermine Kleefeld was sitting on her step with her eyes only half open, beating time to the music with a rolled-up newspaper while she had Herr Albin attach a bouquet of meadow flowers to her blouse, and the bulging-lipped man, sitting at Frau Salomon’s feet, chatted with twisted neck up at her, while the thin-haired pianist stared at her from behind.

The doctors came and mingled with the spa society, Hofrat Behrens in white and Dr. Krokowski in a black coat. They walked down the row of little tables, the Councilor dropping a pleasant witticism at almost every one, so that a wake of cheerful movement marked his way, and then descended to the youth, whose female part immediately turned to Dr. Krokowski rallied, while the Councilor showed Sunday the trick with his lace-up boot in honor of the gentlemen: he put his mighty foot on a higher step, undid the laces, seized them with one hand and closed them without the other, according to a special practice to take help, hooking crosswise with such skill that everyone marveled, and several tried in vain to do the same.

Later Settembrini also appeared on the terrace – he came out of the dining room, leaning on his walking stick, still in his fluff and his yellowish trousers, with a fine,with an alert and critical air, looked round and approached the cousins’ table, saying, “Ah, bravo!” and asking permission to sit with them.

“Beer, tobacco and music,” he said. “There we have your fatherland! I see you have a sense of national sentiment, engineer. They are inYour elements, that pleases me. Let me take part in the harmony of your condition!”

Hans Castorp collected his features – had already done so when he had just caught sight of the Italian. He said:

“But you’re late for the concert, Herr Settembrini, it must be over soon. Don’t you like listening to music?”

“Not on command,” Settembrini replied. “Not according to the weekly calendar. I don’t like it when it smells like a pharmacy and is condescendingly measured out to me for sanitary reasons. I hold a little on my freedom or at least on that remnant of freedom and human dignity that remains of us. I sit in on events like this, as you mostly sit in on us – I come to a quarter of an hour and go on my way again. It gives me the illusion of independence… I’m not saying it’s more than an illusion, but what do you want when it gives me some satisfaction! With your cousin, that’s different. For him it is service. Don’t you, Lieutenant, you consider it part of the service. Oh, I know you know the trick of keeping your pride in slavery. A confusing trick. Not everyone in Europe understands that. Music? Didn’t you ask me if I professed to be a music lover? Well if you ‘lover’to say (Hans Castorp actually does not remember saying that), the expression is not badly chosen, it has a touch of tender frivolity. Alright then, I’ll take it. Yes, I am a lover of music – which is not to say that I particularly respect it – just as I respect and love the word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool, the brilliant ploughshare of progress… Music…it is the semi-articulate, the doubtful, the irresponsible, the indifferent. You will probably object that it may be clear. But nature can also be clear, even a brook can be clear, and what use is that to us? It’s not true clarity, it’s a dreamy, meaningless clarity that doesn’t commit to anything, a clarity without consequences, dangerous because it tempts to calm down with her… Let the music assume the gesture of generosity. Good! She will inflame our feelings with it. However, it is important to ignite reason! The music is apparently the movement itself, – nevertheless I have the suspicion of quietism. Let me take it to the extreme: I have a political aversion to music.”

Here Hans Castorp could not avoid hitting his knee and exclaiming that he had never heard anything like it in his life.

“Consider it anyway!” Settembrini said, smiling. “Music is invaluable as a last resort, as a power to sweep upward and forward, when it finds the spirit preordained for its effects. But literature must have preceded it. Music alone does not move the world forward. Music alone is dangerous. For herpersonally, engineer, it is absolutely dangerous. I could see it in your features as soon as I came.”

Hans Castorp laughed.

‘Oh, you mustn’t look at my face, Mr Settembrini. You wouldn’t believe how the air is getting to me up here. I’m having a harder time acclimatizing than I thought.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

“No why! Hell knows how tired and hot I still am.”

“I think you have to be grateful to the management for the concerts,” said Joachim calmly. ‘You see things from a higher point of view, Mr Settembrini, as a writer, so to speak, and I don’t want to contradict you on that. But I still think that one has to be thankful for a bit of music here. I’m not particularly musical at all, and then the pieces that are played aren’t that great either – neither classical nor modern, just just brass music. But it’s a welcome change. It fills up a couple of hours so decently, I mean: it divides them up and fills them up in detail, so that there is something to it, whereas here one otherwise dwells on the hours and days and weeks so horribly… Can you see it, such an undemanding concert number lasts maybe seven minutes, doesn’t it, and they are something in their own right, they have a beginning and an end, they stand out and are, to a certain extent, protected from being so unexpectedly lost in the general routine. In addition, they are again divided up in many ways, by the figures of the piece, and these again in bars, so that there is always something going on and every momentgets a certain sense to hold on to while otherwise… I’m not sure I’m speaking correctly…”

“Bravo!” exclaimed Settembrini. “Bravo, Lieutenant! They describe very well an undoubted moral moment in the essence of music, namely this that it lends alertness, spirit and preciousness to the passage of time through a quite peculiarly lively measurement. Music awakens time, it awakens us to the finest enjoyment of time, it awakens … to that extent it is moral. Art is moral insofar as it awakens. But what if she does the opposite? When it numbs, lulls, counteracts activity and progress? Music can do that, too, and for that reason it understands the effects of opiates. A devilish effect, gentlemen! The opiate is from the devil, because it creates dullness, persistence, idleness, servile standstill… There is something dubious about music, gentlemen. I keep at it that it is of an ambiguous nature. I am not going too far in declaring them politically suspect.”

He went on talking in this way, and Hans Castorp also listened, but was not really able to follow, firstly because of his tiredness, and then also because he was distracted by the social goings-on among the lighthearted youth there on the steps. Was he right or what was it actually like? The lady with the tapir face was busy sewing a button onto the waistband of the boy with the monocle! And her breath was heavy and hot with asthma as he raised his salt-spoon-like fingernail to his mouth, coughing! They were ill, both of them, but still it showed some strange traffic habits among the young people up here. The music played a polka…